The Philosopher’s Gaze

Even in its best moments, philosophy perpetually abstracts the philosopher from the world the philosopher describes. The philosopher surveys the whole as a view from nowhere, as an impassive and independent look, without itself being implicated in that upon which it gazes. When discussing contradiction or antagonisms, for instance, these antagonisms are set side by side and investigated by the philosophical subject, as if the philosophical subject were a neutral onlooker that is itself outside or independent of these antagonisms. Yet if, as Deleuze argues in the 16th chapter of The Logic of Sense, “…the individual is inseparable from a world” (109), determined by a distribution of pre-individual singularities, how could such a gaze fail to be a point of view. However, here I must take care in how I express myself, for as Deleuze remarks in The Fold, “To the degree that it [a site or point of inflection] represents variation or inflection, it can be called point of view. Such is the basis of perspectivism, which does not mean a dependence in respect to a pregiven or defined subject; to the contrary, a subject will be what comes to the point of view or rather what remains in the point of view” (19). Just as Einstein observed with the constancy of light, it is not subjects that individuate points of view, but rather points of view that individuate subjects.

There are brief moments where philosophy approaches a form, a writing, that would be equal to this content. Perhaps Nietzsche’s use of the aphorism as a method expresses such a form. As Deleuze argues in Nietzsche & Philosophy,

Understood formally, an aphorism is present as a fragment; it is the form of a pluralist thought; in its content it claims to articulate and formulate a sense. The sense of a being, an action, a thing– these are the objects of the aphorism… Only the aphorism is capable of articulating sense, the aphorism is interpretation and the art of interpreting. In the way the poem is evaluation and the art of evaluating, it articulates values. But because values and sense are such complex notions, the poem itself must be evaluated, and the aphorism interpreted. (31)

We look in vain for a unifying philosophy behind the aphorisms; but if this is the case then it is because the aphorisms are mandibles that grasp, articulate, or render a fragment of a world. The aphorisms are heterogeneous universes of value or interpretations. Or better yet, they are ways of being in a world that no longer exists as an irreducible unity within which a plurality of agents exist. It is in this sense that the aphorisms form a properly pluralistic thought, where we no longer have a world as such, but rather fragments or competing points of view in which agents are individuated and where a clamor of voices, filled with antagonisms, fill our ears… Our ears which are also among and within these fragments. Perhaps we also find a similar writing in Blanchot’s Writing of Disaster, or Adorno’s Minima Moralia and Prisms. These are moments in the history of philosophy where form strives to be adequate to the content, and the form of the sovereign subject is itself shattered, such that it can only enter into the work as one voice among others.

Describing the literature of Roger Vailland, Lefebvre writes,

In this book [325,000 francs], as in Vailland’s earlier novels, the author appears as such. He says: “I”. He intervenes as a witness, designating the characters and situating them, entering into dialogue with them, inviting the reader to decide what attitude to adopt towards them: what judgment to make. Here judgment is inseparable from event; it is rigorously included in the story. This authorial presence has various meanings, and not simply on the level of technique. It is Roger Vailland’s way– and a very simple way it is –of resolving a difficult literary problem, that of novelistic consciousness or of consciousness in the novel. Who is speaking? Who is seeing, who saw the actions in the story? Who bridges the gap between the lived in the true. How has the speaker seen or heard about the things he narrates? How has he been able to foretell or sense what will happen next? Who has detected the character’ motives (hidden even to themselves)? And as he is drawn on by the great movement called ‘reading’, with whom does the reader identify, in whose consciousness does he participate? (Critique of Everyday Life, Volume I, 26)

In Vailland’s literature the author is no longer a sovereign onlooker outside the events narrated, but is there amongst the events as a point of view. Nor are we confronted simply with a first person point of view or a stream of consciousness, but rather a heterogeneity of points of view. In this way, the reader is implicated or participates in the novel as yet another point of view in a manner similar to how Brecht strives to implicate the audience in the spectacle. Antagonisms are thereby able to reveal themselves as antagonisms, blind spots as blind spots as blind spots, points of hesitation and indecision as points of indecision. The author is no longer transcendent to the novel, but immanent to the novel, and the reader is no longer a voyeur… Or rather, perhaps the reader becomes aware precisely of his voyeurism by being implicated in the events.

Would it be possible to write philosophically in a way adequate to this form? Would it be possible to write philosophically in a way that no longer posits a meta-theory in this way? Plato sometimes seems to be a joker of this sort.

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3 Responses to “The Philosopher’s Gaze”

I’m curious about this – mainly because I think I spend a little too much time, personally, trying to explain the presentational strategies of theorists committed to the notion that their writing style needs to be adequate to the content… ;-) In other words, the programmatic goals are, I think, good ones:

Antagonisms are thereby able to reveal themselves as antagonisms, blind spots as blind spots as blind spots, points of hesitation and indecision as points of indecision. The author is no longer transcendent to the novel, but immanent to the novel, and the reader is no longer a voyeur… Or rather, perhaps the reader becomes aware precisely of his voyeurism by being implicated in the events.

In theoretical or philosophical works, though, I’m not certain that there is a problem with trying to achieve this explicitly, by foregrounding the claim. Immanent forms of presentation often fare poorly, in terms of how they are received or interpreted (I say this, realising I’m overly oriented to the issue at the moment due to my own work). I’m also I suppose hesitant at trying to bring a reader through an experience in a theoretical work – perhaps it strikes me that this might assume too much about the characteristics of the reader, and therefore the impact that an experience of reading is likely to have – the conclusions someone would be likely to draw, as similar to the author’s own reactions or intentions?

Just scattered thoughts… I guess I’ve tended to be sceptical about effecting theoretical arguments via style – although I’d easily concede that argument isn’t the only thing worth doing.

I share similar concerns about arguments that are partially driven by style and tend to think that forms that have been driven by content have generally been counter-productive. Hopefully this isn’t a reactionary statement on my part, like the remarks you sometimes hear from certain Anglo-American thinkers who denounce something as “nonsense on stilts” because of its difficult style. I think the amount of time I’ve spent with thinkers such as Deleuze, Lacan, Derrida, Heidegger, Hegel, Whitehead, etc., and the charitable way in which I’ve approached their work says otherwise. I do not, however, know that what I was trying to think about here was an issue of style. Rather, I think what I was trying to get at is a form of philosophy that would be immanent to these antagonisms, rather than observing them from above… Something like a chorus of voices. As an undergraduate I remember being struck by the philosophy books from the library. There would always be all these sedimented layers of underlining (pencil, different colored inks, different marginalia, etc) as a sort of trace of all the different people who had read the texts. I imagined writing commentaries premised on these different sedimentations, showing how philosophical texts function as a sort of ink-blot for the questions of the reader. The manner in which desire and questions open a horizon of objectivities seems effaced in the monadological way philosophy is written today. Even those philosophers that are most aware of intersubjectivity and the social as dimensions of our being still adopt monadological ways of posing these questions.

I agree with this – in other words, I think the forms in which questions are posed are quite important – that the starting point tends to shape very strongly what it becomes possible to think through a system. I had misunderstood your concluding comments about meta-theory – I often find myself reconstructing or exposing the tacit meta-theory underlying approaches, in order to try to do what you’re suggesting more adequately. One of the things that is nice about blogging is the layered record of different sorts of confrontation with the questions raised – and, sometimes at least, the greater explicitness about the situational or aleatory provocations for certain kinds of writing.

I’m curious about the opposition you pose at the end of comment, between “monadological” on the one hand, and “intersubjective” or “social” on the other. Again this is a question of personal interest – it may not be something on which you’d like to comment: do you see the “social” and “intersubjectivity” as interchangeable terms, or is there a tacit distinction suggested here?